


Waking Up

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Series: The Weight of Us [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Assassins are Not Always Nice People, Backstory, Bombs, F/M, Gen, Implied (Non-Graphic) Child Abuse, Implied Attempted Teenage Sexual Abuse, Language, Mental Instability, Mentions of Terrorism, Non-Graphic Mentions of Harm to Children, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Relationship, Thoughts That Could Be Considered Passively Suicidal, brief mentions (non-graphic) of harm to children and Natasha's early training and being drugged
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 21:32:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone starts somewhere.  Everyone has a beginning.  Everyone is made up of their experiences.  Everyone wakes up.  Part of <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/series/28569"><i>The Weight of Us</i></a>: the moments leading up to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/550376"><i>Shot in the Dark</i></a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to Kadollan for the beta on the final version of this thing, and thanks to Lar_Laughs, SidheRa, and Anuna for looking over earlier versions of this material.
> 
> This is complete, I'm posting two chapters a day.
> 
>  **RE: WARNINGS - PLEASE READ:** These are moments from Clint and Natasha's past, the early memories (or lack there-of) that lead up to [Shot in the Dark](https://archiveofourown.org/works/550376). As you can imagine, bad things happened. Nothing is terribly graphic (no more graphic than things that happened in _Shot in the Dark_ , anyway, I don't think) - but please use your best judgement when reading. If you have any questions about the warnings, please leave me a comment or shoot me an email (I'm cybermathwitch(at)gmail(dot)com) and I'll do my best to answer them.

_**Early June, 1979 ~ Omaha, Nebraska, USA** _

Clint could only remember a few times from before they ran away. A couple of Christmases (one good, one bad), a day at the park when he got to swing, and a night where he huddled with Barney under their bunk bed while glass shattered and his mother screamed from the other room. He didn’t remember the car ride or the crash, but he remembered the smell of burning fuel, of metal and blood, and the feel of Barney’s shirt as he clung on to what he could reach as someone tried to pull him out of the car.

Then there were the foster homes, four in just a little over five months. Barney was angry, and sometimes he was mean, never to Clint but often to the people trying to take care of them. There wasn’t enough food and more than enough fists and belts to go around. Then Barney came home one afternoon from school and said he’d overheard the social worker talking about splitting them up, and they needed leave, right then, that night.

It was one time that was etched into his brain he didn't actually mind. They’d grabbed the trash bags they always used to carry the handful of things they were allowed to carry with them and had scooted out the bedroom window once their foster family had gone to bed. Then they’d wandered down the road, enjoying being outside under the bright stars. Because it was an adventure. They’d seen the lights from the ferris wheel first, then they’d gotten closer and started to hear bells and laughter and metal clanging. Barney had bounced on his toes with excitement and grabbed Clint by the shirt to hurry him up, half dragging him the last half mile to their destination: The Carson Carnival of Traveling Wonders. 

They'd snuck under the fence, and after wandering around the main drag for awhile, slipped inside the main tent. There was a man on stage throwing knives at another man, and a woman in a pretty blue dress swung easily from one trapeze to another. Clint had been fascinated by the sights and the sounds, but sooner rather than later the show had ended and people had been ushered back outside. He'd gotten sleepy, and he didn't remember most of the next part very well, but Barney had talked to the man who threw the swords and had bragged about how he knew how to juggle and how Clint could throw rocks at anything and never missed.

The Swordsman (which is how Clint would forever think of him, because no one ever used his real name) and the man who told them to call him Trickshot, who’s bow and arrow act they’d missed, had scoffed at Barney’s claims, particularly the ones about what Clint could do. He’d been awake enough at that point, and had scooped up a handful of small pebbles and proceeded to launch them in quick succession at the two carnies’ heads. One had gotten Swordsman right in the eye, but luckily hadn’t had much force behind it. At six he was accurate, but not terribly strong.

Intrigued, they’d agreed to let them come aboard, on the condition that they did what they were told, when they were told. And that had started some of the best and worst years of Clint’s life. On that first night, the Carnival had seemed wonderful, colorful, and exciting. The idea of running away with the circus was a little kid’s dream, and they'd both been too young and naive to imagine how very wrong they could be.

*****

The first lesson Clint learned was if you didn’t miss, you didn’t get beaten. If you didn’t miss, you got to eat. Equally important (to Clint’s mind) was that Barney got to eat. While he learned about targets and arrows, Barney learned the various odd jobs that made up the life of a carnie. 

The Carnival wasn’t so exciting in the bare light of day. It was old, and run down, just like most of it’s denizens. The original Jack Carson had started the show back in the fifties, and most of the acts and workers had been immigrants who’d fled Europe during the second world war. Old Jack had died sometime in the sixties, and his nephew had taken over. He hadn’t added much, had mostly run the show into the ground, but the old timers had stayed on because they had nowhere else to go.

Old Madge, a woman in her seventies, took them into her trailer and became their defacto grandmother. They learned Romany from her because her English was so poor. They learned German from the Gertse brothers who had started their career as strong men but now maintained the equipment. Barney didn’t care so much, but Clint had a knack for languages. By the time he was eleven he’d even gotten Mr. Patrushev to teach him Russian.

He also learned that the higher up he went, the safer he was.

He hadn’t realized at the time that Barney was trying to buy their way into the circus, essentially offering them up as indentured servants, and inadvertently offering himself up for… other things. Things Clint wouldn’t realize had been going on until one night years later, after Barney had been arrested with some other guys for B&E, when the Swordsman had decided he would do instead and had him pinned to the floor and he was flailing around for something - anything - he could hit him with to make him stop. 

The knife had been blessedly close by, and there’d been blood everywhere before the old man had been able to get his pants off. That was the night he learned important lessons about never, ever going anywhere without a weapon, and more importantly, that he should make himself the weapon, so he wouldn’t have to rely on something that could be lost or out of reach.

******

He didn’t think that he’d actually killed the Swordsman (and he hadn’t) but he’d gone running to Old Madge’s place in stark terror. Madge had frowned at the blood and his refusal to explain what had happened, but in retrospect, she'd known. Known about all of it, actually, not that there was much she could've done - at eighty, she'd owed her survival to the Swordsman just a surely as he and Barney did, after all. 

The Swordsman had given him a wide berth after that. Clint had wanted to run away, but he was just fourteen, and with Barney in jail, he hadn't had any idea where to go or what else he could do. So he'd waited it out for four more years, then he'd packed up his belongings, the little bit of money he'd saved, and gone to the army recruiter to enlist.

They’d been impressed that he could speak four languages fluently, and knew enough to get by in two more. Then he’d taken the standardized tests and they’d started talking about things like Officers training and Special Forces, and Clint had been pleased. For a kid who'd barely scraped by in school (usually by correspondence at that), it was to feel like he was doing something right. He’d broken most of the short and long range shooting records by the end of Basic training, and when the non-descript suit had shown up at the barracks after AIT to talk to him about some ‘special opportunities’ he’d jumped at the chance. They’d fast-tracked him into sniping and then Black Ops, and he disappeared, at least as far as the rest of the military and the civilian population was concerned. 

He had no problem with the killing - they usually sent him after people who needed to be killed, and he knew first hand there were plenty of people the world was better off without.


	2. Chapter 2

She knows her name was Natalia Alianova Romanova, but that no one had bothered to record the day she was born. She supposes her parents must have known, but they died in a fire when she was four years old. She was found among the wreckage and taken to an orphanage. A man came and chose her, out of all the little girls, because even at age four, she'd already had dead eyes.

Years later, when she's taught what to look for in future recruits, she's told that the eyes are the most important, that there's an emptiness to them in someone who would be suitable for the life. That you could see it, even if you didn't know the cause. Sometimes it was from trauma or abuse. Sometimes, it was just how they were born. They can't tell her which one she was, and she doesn't know if she had ever had anything good within her. She wonders sometimes if she had been a monster even in her nursery. She might even have been the cause of the fire that killed her family, but there's no one left alive who knows.

There were only a handful of people left alive who knew anything at all about _any_ of her childhood.

She remembers thin mattresses on metal frames. There were no sheets, just ratty blankets in the winter and institutional grade fans in the summer. Pillows came and went, but they were never substantial. She remembers hearing some of the other girls crying, particularly after they’d just arrived.

She doesn’t remember when she arrived or if she cried.

The first thing the Red Room did, besides instilling obedience, was try to eradicate whatever personality a child might have had. There were no "I likes" or "I don't likes" allowed. There were no favorite things, and because they recruited intelligent children, most caught on quickly. If they didn't, well. They didn't last long. It is a common misconception that they were taught not to have emotions. In order to do the kind of deep cover work that the Red Room usually utilized them for, a good understanding of human emotions was essential. They were just taught not to have any of their own. Any hint of individual personality was dealt with swiftly.

She remembers screaming, but can’t always remember if she’s the one screaming or if it’s someone else. 

Things become clearer as she gets older - she has snapshots in her mind of being taught how to dress, to dance, to eat, as well as being taught how to fight and how to kill easily without caring about it. She remembers when _he_ arrived, she doesn't know from where, and took over their martial training. She remembers that he trained her in other important skills, too. A Red Room operative can't do her job if she doesn't know how to seduce her mark. He was surprisingly patient and gentle, at least compared to most of the other instructors they had, and that made her more uncomfortable than the ones who were brutal to them.

She can recall missions, her earliest ones, a few from before he came along, then later being sent out with him to do simple jobs within the country. She remembers two parties, one with a yellow party dress, and later, when she's older, one that he takes her to. She knows there was an overwhelming press of people at some sort of government function, a celebration of a local politician's birthday, and that her job was to seduce his oldest son, get him to take her into the private side of the residence, and then kidnap the youngest daughter and bring her back to the Red Room for leverage. She didn't need to know why they needed leverage with the man, and she didn't have any desire to ask. The little girl cried for her mother, and Natalia just looked past her out the window at the city streets of Cherkessk. He sat across from her in the limo with a blank, disinterested look on his face, but when they reached their drop off point and the girl was handed over, she felt His hand on her shoulder for just a moment and knew she'd done well.

She knows there were more missions. Some of them she remembers quite well, others are more of a blank space in her mind that she knows ought to have memories in it but just... doesn't. 

Then there are straps and gurneys and too many exam rooms to count, with blurry faces that fade in and out with the sedation, fire burning in her veins and her mind from whatever they’re doing to her, and always the bitter, metallic taste of the special cocktail they use to keep them unconscious while they work. That taste is probably the first thing she remembers having a distinct like or dislike for.

Every time she wakes up with that taste in her mouth, she can feel the holes in her mind. She can tell that there are things missing, just not what they are. There’s no sense of how long it’s been or how much is gone, just this great yawning emptiness that she doesn’t have the first clue how to fill. 

She knows her name is Natalia Alianova Romanova. She was born in the Red Room. She was taken, broken, then put back together in their image - the image of the Black Widow - and trained to be a killer. They were very good at what they did, and made sure that she was equally good at what she does. She is their greatest success, but she is also their biggest mistake.


	3. Chapter 3

_**TIME AND LOCATION: UNKNOWN** _

Once he decided to kill a man to watch him die.

He'd killed before, knew he'd kill again - but he wondered about the enjoyment he took in his job. He wondered where his own lines were.

Did he enjoy the hunt? Did he enjoy still being alive after the threat was dead? Or did he enjoy the act of killing, in and of itself? 

Yes, to the first. Absolutely to the second. The third... he didn't know.

So he tested the theory.

The man had drifted through the bar in the back end of nowhere some seventy miles from the hellhole he was currently stationed in, looking lost and in search of oblivion in the bottom of a bottle. Not even remotely a threat, and that was an important piece of the puzzle, that he not be a threat. He was no one Clint had ever seen before, or would likely see again, and that was also important. It distilled the act down to simple life or death. Mercy or murder. Could he pull the trigger? Would he want to?

When the man stumbled outside, Clint followed him. With a gun, rather than his bow, because he wanted this to be up close.

He wanted to _see_. He wanted to _know_.

He stood over the man, collapsed in the alleyway, shaking and pleading for his life and thought long and hard about pulling the trigger.

And then he ran up against a wall that until that moment he hadn't been entirely sure he possessed. This man wasn't a threat, he wasn't a target, wasn't someone he could pull out a file full of sins to pin against him. He was no one and nothing to Clint, but he was still someone: a non-combatant, an innocent.

Unless he was given more reason, more provocation, he had no desire to pull the trigger. In fact, he had an aversion to it.

So the man lived. And Clint learned.


	4. Chapter 4

For awhile, she had existed in a sort of a fugue state. Everything felt normal, except there was an echo, like a song she couldn't quite place, or a dream she could only half remember. 

She didn't think it was a very pleasant dream. 

She went through her days by rote, through practices and fittings, dress rehearsals and performances. Occasionally she would go out with other members of the company after a show, but more often she'd gone back to her hotel room alone, and tried to banish the pressure and ache from the inside of her mind with aspirin and tea. Some nights, she was successful, and found herself drifting into a restless sleep. Other nights, she had dreams of pain and blood, violence and fire, and found herself waking with a scream caught in her throat.

There were days she thought she was losing her mind, bit by precious bit. Once she started finding herself in places other than her room, she'd been sure of it. The lobby wasn't so bad, she reasoned, but one time she'd woken up to find herself in an alleyway, huddled in nightwear covered by a heavy coat, with blood drying on her hands and feet.

Sometime late in the summer, Natasha Romanov, _coryphee_ fell apart, and Natalia Romanova woke up and remembered who she really was.


	5. Chapter 5

_**September, 1997 ~ LOCATION REDACTED** _

The mission was fucking textbook. A lone bomber taking hostages in a school, using the children and teachers as human shields and as a way to get the attention of the world and the authorities - it was a scenario he’d seen run a hundred fucking times, and he knew the procedure in his sleep. His spotter was already in place, and they’d put him on the roof with the best vantage point of the classroom, because they knew he wouldn't miss and he was their best chance of ending it with the least loss of life. 

There was a bomb expert looking over the scene, trying to see from about 30 feet away what kind of explosives and rigging the guy’d set up, and he was relaying the information back to everyone with an ear piece. Clint was listening as well as watching because he knew how high the goddamn stakes were, he could see the children huddling frightened at the bomber's feet.

Ever since he'd taken his place on the adjacent roof, he'd felt like something was off, something about the shot wasn't good. His visibility was um-impeded, and he knew he could make it without any hitting any of the kids, but it just felt wrong. 

The bomber wasn't interested in being talked down, and at the 10 hour mark, as his agitation increased, Clint heard his commanding officer give the signal to set up the shot. He questioned it, out loud over the main channel even though it was completely inappropriate, because it still didn’t feel right and was informed in no uncertain terms that he’d follow orders when given or he’d be court martialed and stripped of every rank he’d ever earned. So he'd put his finger on the trigger and fired when he was told to, even as his stomach twisted in on itself in warning.

The explosion literally threw him to the far side of the roof, and the crack to the head he received was bad enough it knocked him out for two days.

When he woke up, he had two MPs hovering at the door to his room, and a JAG coming in to tell him that the bomber had a dead man’s switch that went off right after the bullet - his bullet - went through the guy’s head. Because shit rolls down hill, and he was conveniently placed at the bottom, ready to take the brunt of the fall-out coming from the fledgling government over the death of so many innocents, he was the one to blame. The recordings of what had actually been said during the op were conveniently destroyed in the blast, and a concerned General had explained patiently before the private inquiry board that a cocky and brash young sniper had gone off spec and shot before they could ascertain the full scope of the situation. 

They'd pulled up other information, too - some of the less than savory things his unit had done both on and off duty, because hell, they weren't hired to be angels, after all. Most of it was true, some of it was painted to look maybe a little bit worse than it had really been, or maybe his perspective had just been fucked up. Who really knew?

Because he was Black Ops, no one actually knew he existed (officially) he'd been sent to Leavenworth after a mockery of a trial, his name replaced with a number. A fitting end, he thought to himself, for a no-account piece of carnival trash. 

He’d entirely resigned himself to another forty or fifty years (at least) of the same cell, different guards who are still all the same, and living without a name. Because the other prisoners needed something to call him besides a number, he'd fallen back on the name from his old carnival act, and told them to just call him Hawkeye. He liked that it reminded him of who he used to be, even while he was going slowly insane from the confinement.

Then, four months to the day that he checked in to the military prison, Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD checked him out.


	6. Chapter 6

She first noticed him in Bern, the sense of someone watching her itching across the back of her neck. Marrakesh had still been a sticky sweetness in the back of her mouth, the feeling of being out of control lingering on her tongue, behind her eyes, in her hands.

Any number of people could've been sent for her. Red Room, CIA, former KGB, the Chinese, MI5, SHIELD - countless more governments or private contractors because she had worked for and against them all. 

She covered her hair, changed her clothes, and slipped out a side exit to go buy hair dye that would change her coloring red to blonde. A small thing, but it was the small things that made the biggest difference.

Even after the change, she could feel him, feel his eyes on the back of her neck: in Munich, in Krakow, in Antwerp, in Nice. He moved fast and she moved faster, but every so often she could circle back around and get a sense of where he'd been. She didn't know his name, but she thought back to the fire and the other agents (all dead) and SHIELD made the most sense.

They'd finally found someone that could track her... track _her_. It was a sign, it was an omen she couldn't deny, and she wasn't even a superstitious woman by nature. 

*****

_She wakes up in Paris three days after a close call in Venice and thinks that today might be the day. She goes down to the hotel gym for a run because she's tired of running, tired of playing this stupid game. He'll come to her and she'll ask and he'll answer, with either a word or a bullet and she no longer thinks she entirely cares which one._


End file.
